by Vic Connor
“What do, I mean… how do I get out of this, Mrs. White?”
Jamyllah blinked slowly, her voice a tight whisper. “You don’t.”
Niko palmed the cheap fabric on his chest where his cross was supposed to be. When his parents left, it was the only thing they’d left with him, but when he was arrested, the state had taken it away. He thought of cool creek water running down his chin, and of MacCready’s gruff, nasal voice. He’s a stain on society. A waste.
Jamyllah lifted her hand, pulled back her sleeve, peered at the tiny watchface that sat right on her pulse. “That’s ten minutes,” she said, not unkindly. “I’m going to do my best for you, Mr. Somov, but I have about thirty other kids I need to do my best for too. That’s just the way it is.” She straightened her pile of folders, picked them up, and walked to the door.
“Hey, Mrs. White?”
She paused, the door held open with her foot, and looked over her shoulder. “What’s up, kiddo?”
“Who were they?”
Jamyllah’s brow furrowed. “Who?”
“Those people. The ones who… I mean, y’know. The ones who died.” He nodded at his folder on the back of her stack.
Jamyllah’s thin mouth pouted open, and slowly, she closed the door again. “Nikolai,” she breathed, “they were your parents.”
4
Never Heard that Before in Prison
Niko moved somnambulant through the trial, and after that, the sentencing. Jamyllah was not a big crier either; she only rubbed his shoulder and said she was sorry. The speech seemed rehearsed. His most recent foster parents were absent from the whole thing, but Niko didn’t really blame them for that. Days later, a frizzy-haired prison guard retrieved him from the county jail because that’s where he’d been through the whole judicial process. He left the jailhouse in silence, having no one to say goodbye to.
“What about my stuff?” Niko asked a guard out in the parking lot. He was thinking of his cross; the one his parents had given him.
“You won’t need it where you’re going,” the guard said in a sing-song baritone. “Usually, it would go to your next of kin, but you made sure you didn’t have that anymore.” The driver, a woman with a red, wind-blown face, opened the back door for the guard, then stood watch as he pushed Niko inside. There was one other person in the van, a black kid with a goatee, soft eyes, and a diamond-shaped scar on the bridge of his nose. His head was shaved, just like Niko’s because that’s what they did when you got booked, and once every week after that.
The guard fastened Niko’s handcuffs to a bar mounted to the inside panel of the van, then hopped out, shutting the door behind him.
“Hey,” the black kid said. Outside, the guard and the driver rounded the van.
“Hey,” Niko said.
“You up in Monroe?”
“Van can only go one place,” Niko growled, hoping to end the conversation.
“Tough guy, huh? Never seen that before in prison.”
That made Niko smirk despite himself.
“My name’s Jacob,” the kid said, jangling his handcuffs. “Forgive me if I don’t shake hands.”
“Niko,” said Niko. “Are you, y’know, in the Queue?”
Jacob’s look sobered. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you do?”
“I…killed my parents.” Niko wasn’t even sure it wasn’t true anymore. It had been his knife, that is, he’d been convicted—wasn’t that more immutable than his own, foggy memory?
“Whoa-ho, what did they do?”
“Gave me up, I guess. I don’t remember doing it.”
“You should have pleaded insanity,” Jacob suggested. “I mean, that wouldn’t have worked for me, but you’re a good-lookin’ white kid. They can get away with anything.” Beneath them, the van rumbled to life. With a jerk, it pulled out of the parking spot.
“What about you?”
“Me?” Jacob rubbed his scar with his thumb. “Doesn’t matter because I didn’t do it.”
Niko raised his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I know,” Jacob said, peering past the guard’s frizzy head, trying to get a view through the window. “Never heard that before in prison.”
5
The Tall Man
It was that fresh kind of cold out in the prison yard, the kind that scrubbed the windowless stagnation of a cell out of you. Niko split off from the procession as soon as the guards allowed it, marched with his head down past the garden shed to the west corner of the yard. There, the sounds of construction weren’t so loud. There had been constant jackhammering, trucks reversing, and crackling radio—a mix of country, mariachi, and Bollywood—since Niko had been taken to the prison four months ago.
But in the west corner, toward the entrance, you could see through the layers of chain-link to the outside. A black car kicked up a dust cloud on the dirt road, the lone string that connected the prison to Monroe, the only town for thirty miles. The prison was up north, away from affluent citizens who didn’t like to be reminded of people like criminals. The evergreens ruled the land up here. A sharp treeline spanned out in the distance, tracts of pine forest Niko longed to get lost in. It was maddening being so close to it and unable to reach it.
The black car parked near the entryway checkpoint. Someone in a crisp uniform got out of the driver’s seat, rounded the car, opened the back door. A man crawled out, both hands on the door frame, unfolding as he stood up. He was tall, and Niko could tell even from this distance, gaunt. Insectile limbs bent to straighten his loose, charcoal suit. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his lapel and lit one, sighing out smoke. A dumpy guard waddled over to him, thumb tucked in his belt. The pair had a brief conversation, the guard nodding, the man scanning the yard. He lifted a finger and pointed…
…at Niko.
The chain-link jangled as Niko let go of it, stepping back. The tall man took off his hat revealing a bald head; not the common buzzcut done to save on hair-washing, but shiny and hairless. From this distance, and under the noonday sun, the man’s sunken eye-sockets looked like black hollows.
Behind Niko, someone cried out—a little sound, like a cat’s meow. He turned, and back near the garden shed, the edge of someone’s shoulders peeked out; the curve of a back, curled on the ground like a pill bug; a foot winding back, then disappearing with velocity from his view. Another cry, like a sob. Niko walked toward it, then marched, then ran. He rounded the shed and found four guys. One had dark, freshly-shorn hair. Another wore his jumpsuit with the top folded down, leaving only a white undershirt. The third was growing a wispy, red mustache. They were taking turns kicking a kid curled up on the ground. Two more steps and the dark-haired boy was within arm’s reach.
Niko grabbed him by the collar then jerked him back against the shed’s corrugated metal wall. It shuddered. Getting in his face, Niko recognized him as Basheer, a kid on his cell block.
“Who—”
“This ain’t your business, Somov,” said the kid with the red mustache. Niko turned, wound up, and crashed his clenched knuckles into the guy’s stomach. He folded like paper.
“Coby!” cried the dark-haired kid, Basheer.
“Get him… Hyeok-Jae,” Coby coughed out, bent double.
Niko turned to face the guy with his uniform folded down, Hyeok-Jae. Niko surged forward and stumbled over something soft. It was the kid these three had been beating on, trying to scramble away. He cried out when Niko’s six-foot frame fell on him. Niko gritted his teeth, pushed himself up by the kid’s shoulder, pressing him down. As he was getting to his feet, Hyeok-Jae grabbed him by the hair, then kneed him in the face. Niko rolled to the side, grabbing his nose.
“Yeah! Mess that gloomy freak up.” It was Basheer, who was coming back around to get in on the action.
“Didn’t know you had it in you, Somov,” Hyeok-Jae said.
Blinking back the pain in his sinuses, Niko roared and scrambled to his feet, running at Hyeok-Jae. He crashed into him,
tackling him to the ground, then hitting him over and over until hands grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him away.
To Niko’s surprise, it wasn’t Basheer, or Coby, or one of the guards; it was the kid who had been taking the beating, face all swollen and blood on his teeth. Basheer helped Hyeok-Jae up, then tugged him away, glaring at Niko. “Freak!” he spat at him, before he, Cody, and a bloodied Hyeok-Jae ran off to the yard.
Niko spun, and must have looked pissed, because the kid put his hands up and stepped back. He wasn’t as small as Niko had thought at first. He had a big head with cornrows and overlarge eyes. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
“H-hey. Your name is Niko, right?” His voice was soft and high.
Niko glared at him, rolled his shoulders, shoved his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know what that was about, but you oughta, I mean, you should be able to take care of yourself, y’know? You can’t lie there and hope someone will come help you, it’s pathetic.”
The kid frowned, almost a pout.
That pissed Niko off even more. He was still keyed up from the fight. “Why’d you stop me?” His knuckles twitched with the unfulfilled desire to beat those guys’ faces in.
“If the guards caught you, you’d get in trouble.”
Stupid. Niko looked over his shoulder through the chain-link, taking a few breaths to calm down. The black car was still parked out front, but the tall man was gone. “What’d you say your name was?”
“Chris,” the kid said.
“Well, Chris, it’s like… I can’t really get in more trouble than I’m already in, y’know?”
Chris wet his lips, cherry-red with blood. “Yeah… You’re…in the queue, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t cry to the DA?”
That, at last, got Niko to look back at Chris. “What?”
“They say if you cry at your sentencing, they usually take the death penalty off the table. Didn’t your lawyer tell you?”
“She told me.”
“But you didn’t cry?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you want to live?”
Niko squinted out at the evergreens, opened his fist, then closed it again. “Not as much as I didn’t want to cry, I guess.”
6
The Long Walk
In prison, you could set your watch by where you were. The work room, the cafeteria, the yard. Nobody went anywhere outside the schedule. So when he returned from the library and Galang, his celly, wasn’t there, it was notable.
It made for a bad kind of silence. With wild silence, life was still everywhere—y’know, like chirping, cracking, snuffling, babbling. Silence in this concrete box, laying bleary-eyed on his cot, was as stagnant as the windowless air. So when footsteps clattered down the hall, it was all Niko could hear. They slowed to a stop in front of his cell door.
Niko sat up in bed. The door unlocked, swung open. It was one of the cell-block guards, CO Guzman. He frowned his mustache at him. “Out, Somov,” he said, but there wasn’t the usual bite of authority in it. A bad sign.
“Where am I going?”
Guzman sighed. “Just get up.”
Niko swung his legs around to the floor but didn’t stand. His hand went to his chest, where his cross had always been, and wasn’t now. It had been months since he’d reached for it. “What’s wrong?”
Guzman didn’t look at him, the way a lot of adults didn’t. “You got moved up the Queue, Somov.”
Hand still on his chest, Niko felt his heart rate kick up. “What? W-why?”
“They don’t tell me nothing. Come on.”
Unconsciously, Niko’s eyes darted around the room. The tiny barred window, the concrete walls, the doorway blocked by Guzman’s apple-shaped body. Adrenaline jackhammered through him down to his fingertips. Run, his body was telling him.
But, he thought, there’s nowhere to go.
Doesn’t matter. Run.
Niko stood, vibrated in place, trapped and full of energy—y’know, like bouncing off the walls. Guzman turned to walk out onto the cell-block ramp, expecting Niko to follow him. Niko didn’t; he took two steps, emerged from the cell, then sprinted in the opposite direction.
“Hey! Somov!”
The noise came from behind him. As the other inmates realized what was happening, they started to hoot and holler, pounding the bars of their cells. Guzman was calling in an escape attempt. The old wound in Niko’s leg, the ghost of a bullet that never healed quite right, ached at him.
Doesn’t matter, his brain thundered to the rhythm of his shoes hammering the cell block’s grated walkway. Run.
He made it as far as the stairwell before another CO crashed into him, putting him down with cracks from his baton. It would take fewer hits if Niko stopped trying to get up, but he was on pure, animal instinct. It wasn’t until they got the cuffs on him that he settled, falling into lethargy. The only thing his sluggish brains registered was passing Chris’ big-eyed face, pressed up between the bars of his cell, watching him get carried off.
A long, trance-like walk followed. The next thing Niko was really conscious of was Guzman passing him off to a pair of guards he didn’t recognize. This area of the prison, too, was unfamiliar, he realized. Every part of the penitentiary Niko had been in was either hospital white or vomit green. Here, the walls were a dark grey, with a pair of colored stripes drawing a path down every corridor. One was ice-blue, the other a fiery, reddish-orange. They took two turns to an elevator, and once inside, one of the stoic guards thumbed floor four on the console. Niko hadn’t known the prison even had more than two floors. They rode it up, then the doors opened to a long, empty hallway.
They passed very few doors. The few they did were big, thick, grey things with tiny paper-white labels Niko couldn’t squint hard enough to read. They reminded him of those diesel guys—y’know, like the ones with a head that was too small for their body. “So this is, I mean, I see why they call it ‘the long walk,’ y’know?” The joke was a question. Where are we? Where are we going? But the two strange guards didn’t laugh; didn’t answer. For a moment, just an instant, he felt annoyed, wishing they would just get there, until he remembered what waited for him when they did. And right then, the guards stopped, turning him to face one of the grey doors. They were close enough and still enough for Niko to read its label: “Ravenscroft S08.” They pushed him inside.
It didn’t look like an execution chamber. The room had no operating table, no audience viewing. It was more like a waiting room, or a shrink’s office. Overstuffed chairs, warm colors, void of belongings. There were no shelves for books or drawers to stuff knick-knacks into. Directly across from the door he’d entered was another cold light bubbling between the jambs. The room was lit by a single overhead lamp, which highlighted an oblong desk in the center of the room. On it, there was a neat stack of papers—like, maybe a dozen sheets—and a pen laid parallel beside it. Without a word, the guards unlocked Niko’s handcuffs, then cleared out just as he spotted a dark figure seated in the corner of the room. The door shut as the figure unfurled up from the chair like a snake out of a basket. “Hello, Niko,” spoke a croaking baritone.
Niko pressed his back against the door, pawing for the handle as the tall figure sauntered forward into the low lamplight. It turned out he was just a man, tall and gaunt but human. Now feeling ridiculous, Niko peeled himself off the door and straightened up.
“Did I scare you?” The man’s voice sounded warm now, with a laugh like a crackling fire. “I’m sorry, my boy, I suppose I…looked a bit grim, sitting in the dark. I fear I…may have nodded off, waiting for you. What on Earth took so much time? Ah, but I suppose the facility is…rather big, after all.”
The man’s sentences rolled like hills, always ending in a steep drop-off, the last word a breath, as if speaking winded him. Instead of a few deep wrinkles, the texture of his skin was a network of tiny cracks and folds. Something about him was familiar. Had Niko met this guy somewhere
before?
The question must have shown in Niko’s face, because the guy quirked a naked brow. He didn’t smile but was never quite not smiling either. His deep-set eyes twinkled with amusement and sadness at once; they said, I know so much more than you do, my boy.
“Not much for conversation, I see,” the man said. “Well…I suppose, given the circumstances. Sit down, please, relax, I only…want to talk.”
Niko’s fingers crept over the cool, metal handle of the door, then he shifted his body so it was hidden behind his back. Staring at the man, he turned the handle as far as it would go. He pushed back; pulled toward him. Nothing. The door was locked.
Run, his instincts whispered. There, behind the tall, thin man, was another door, unlabeled. Niko eased his hand off the handle, then sat in the chair with both feet planted firmly on the floor and his fingers locked tightly together in his lap. He was already falling into his usual routine of meeting system officials. He breathed slowly in through his nose and slowly out through his mouth. He had learned that in anger management class at Atwood—perhaps the only useful thing out of that miserable experience. And the only thing that didn’t make him angry when he thought of the place.
When he felt himself getting angry, he’d press his feet to the floor and squeeze his hands together. In theory, the rage would flow out through the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands rather than being directed at the person who was making him angry. It sounded like pure nonsense and probably was, but it seemed to work for him. Usually. Well, sometimes.